Tag: Chinese literature
The Daylily’s 2,500-Year Journey: How China Turned a Poet’s Flower into a Kitchen Staple
The Chinese idiom "huánghuācài dōu liáng le," literally "even the daylily dish has gone cold," is a northern...
Mao Set Kill Quotas by City: 700,000 Executed in 1951
In 1951, gunshots rang through the lives of countless ordinary people across China. Men who had switched...
China’s Five Sacred Creatures and What They Actually Meant
The dragon: lord of transformation, emblem of imperial power The Shuowen Jiezi, the Han dynasty's...
How Beijing’s Character Simplification Campaign Severed China from Its Own Civilization
Look carefully at two versions of the same character. The first is 愛, the traditional form of the Chinese...
Changsha: City of Poets, Scholars, and Ancient Kilns
Changsha sits at the confluence of mountain and river, with Yuelu Mountain rising to its west and the...
China’s Most Educated Man Gu Hongming Spent His Life Defending His Country’s Lost Values
At the turn of the twentieth century, China was losing a war it had been fighting for decades, not on...
Was the Yuan Dynasty Chinese? Rethinking China’s Identity Beyond Ethnicity and Empire
The debate reflects a broader shift in historical interpretation. In modern discourse, particularly under...
‘Xiaoman’s Waist’: The Ancient Love Story Behind Guangzhou’s Iconic Tower
Rising over the skyline of Guangzhou, China’s 600-meter television tower twists elegantly toward the...
Guan Hanqing–The Greatest Chinese Playwright
The remarkable Guan Hanqing* lived at a time when the Mongols had invaded China to include it in the...